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It's a bittersweet deathwatch for the geek blogs: With the rise of the hybrid cell phone-PDA, each quarter brings fewer plain old handheld computers. Do kids today even remember the PalmPilot, let alone Apple's Newton?

Yesterday saw another nail hammered in the coffin, as TechWeb, among others, broke the news of the latest IDC report showing the 10th consecutive quarterly decline in PDA sales: "The number of handheld devices shipped in the second quarter ended June 30 dropped 26.3 percent from the same period a year ago to 1.4 million units."

Still, rumors of extinction may be overstated. Australian tech news site ARNnet.com digs up an expert (apparently the owner of something called the "Organizer King") who says that "although the phones offer a lot of functions, they still don't do all of it very well" -- a fact, he says, that assures an ongoing market for PDAs. Red Herringcomes to the same conclusion, drawing from a recent In-Stat survey which shows that "in spite of the growing popularity of smart phones, consumers aren’t yet ready to trade in their laptops and PDAs for a single, do-it-all device."

Hey, some still swear by the Rolodex. Of course, perhaps the iPhone will change all that.

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